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Digital Media Software
Review: Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium
5/30/2007
And the RestPhotoshop CS3 Extended also inherits all of the new features in Photoshop CS3 Standard. We've gone over these in some detail in the past, so I'll just touch on them briefly here:
- New interface, including dockable palettes;
- The ability to use non-destructive, live filters on 2D layers;
- Improvements to Vanishing Point, such as the ability to manipulate the angles of the perspective planes interactively;
- Black and white conversion;
- Improvements to Curves adjustments;
- Adjustable cloning with a preview overlay;
- Adjustable healing with a preview overlay;
- A new "Quick Selection Tool" for masking;
- A "Refine Edge" function for improving selection outlines, including feathering, contraction and expansion, mask previews and other features;
- Automatic layer alignment and blending (for compositing and for merging photos)
- Enhanced "Merge to 32-bit HDR"
- A streamlined interface, with collapsible palettes;
- An update to Camera Raw;
- Integration with Photoshop Lightroom;
- Device Central for exporting to mobile formats;
- A new version of Adobe Bridge, which includes support for filters and the stacking of images, a new loupe tool and previous of Flash content; and
- Improvements to printing.
On top of all that, CS3 Extended also adds support for DICOM and MATLAB files for medical applications. These files can be imported as stacks as well, for applications like animating the layers of a brain scan.
InDesign CS3
Performance, Compatibility
First up is the all-important switch to Universal Binary support for Intel-based Macs. Like most of the applications Adobe is introducing today, InDesign supports both PowerPC- and Intel-based Macs running Mac OS X 10.4.8 or later, bringing immeasurable performance improvements to the application over InDesign CS2 running under Rosetta on Intel-based Macs.
Unlike Photoshop CS3 Extended, InDesign's most significant enhancement in its CS3 incarnation is probably in the category of performance and compatibility. And this is embodied in the all-important switch to Universal Binary for Intel-based Macs. (It also continues to support PowerPC-based Macs, like Photoshop and Illustrator) And this switch brings immeasurable performance improvements to the application over InDesign CS2 running under Rosetta. I say "immeasurable" because we do not have a suite of benchmark tests to run on InDesign CS3. Nevertheless, the difference between the two versions is immediately obvious to anyone who's been stuck in Rosetta hell waiting for the upgrade.
It also, of course, gains support for Windows Vista and continues to support XP.
InDesign CS3's revamped interface. (Click for larger image.)
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